Spokane chooses Jewels Helping Hands to oversee the core of its homeless shelter system

Jewels Helping Hands will operate Spokane’s homeless “navigation center” – the central facility that homeless people can start at before they are sent to a shelter or housing service.

The $1.7 million contract for the next 18 months was approved 5-2 Monday by the Spokane City Council.

Council members Michael Cathcart and Jonathan Bingle voted against the contract.

The nonprofit, which also runs several of the city’s homeless shelters, will work with Providence to provide services to those who pass through the system. In the same vote, Catholic Charities of Eastern Washington received a $1.3 million contract to offer “street outreach” services, meant to help funnel people into the navigation center, among other services.

The move marks the first major transition in leadership after the initial rollout of the “scatter-site” shelter model Mayor Lisa Brown introduced: eight smaller shelters that replaced the large congregate shelter warehouse on Trent Avenue that had been the cornerstone of former Mayor Nadine Woodward’s homelessness shelter plan.

Waters Meet, formerly known as the Empire Health Foundation, had initially been in charge of the navigation center, as well as the selection and subcontracting to launch the scatter-site shelters. Unlike Waters Meet, Jewels Helping Hands will not currently have the authority to create additional shelters in the city’s scatter-site system.

The transition comes as the navigation center itself undergoes changes of its own. Originally designed with 30 beds, similar to the size of the other scatter-site shelters, the facility will drop the bed space in favor of expanding its daytime services coordinating people to other services.

Those 30 lost beds will reportedly be absorbed by expanding capacity at other shelters or possibly be the launching of Waters Meet’s pending “tiny home” village.

Cathcart argued that the loss of beds moved the navigation center further from an ideal model, wherein homeless people could enter the facility, stay in the building itself for a short period of time while they were being processed, and then be navigated to the next proper shelter or transitional housing for that person.

Dawn Kinder, who oversees the city division that contains its homeless services, argued the additional space was needed to simplify the navigation center’s services and expand its capacity to coordinate people during the day.

The new providers could prove controversial, with many critics of the city’s broader homelessness policy frequently blaming Jewels Helping Hands and Catholic Charities for spillover effects near their projects, including the downtown House of Charity and the former Camp Hope homeless encampment, which Jewels Helping Hands managed and worked to close in 2023.